From West to East and Back Again: An Educational Reading of Hermann Hesse’s Later Work

100 Pages·2012·0.61 MB·English

by  Peter Roberts (auth.)

FROMWESTTOEASTANDBACKAGAIN
EDUCATIONAL FUTURES
RETHINKING THEORY AND PRACTICE
Volume 51

Series Editors
Michael A. Peters
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Editorial Board

Michael Apple, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Miriam David, Institute of Education, London University, UK
Cushla Kapitzke, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Simon Marginson, University of Melbourne, Australia
Mark Olssen, University of Surrey, UK
Fazal Rizvi, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Linda Tuahwai Smith, University of Waikato, New Zealand
Susan Robertson, University of Bristol, UK

Scope
This series maps the emergent field of educational futures. It will commission
books on the futures of education in relation to the question of globalisation and
knowledge economy. It seeks authors who can demonstrate their understanding of
discourses of the knowledge and learning economies. It aspires to build a
consistent approach to educational futures in terms of traditional methods,
including scenario planning and foresight, as well as imaginative narratives, and it
will examine examples of futures research in education, pedagogical experiments,
new utopian thinking, and educational policy futures with a strong accent on actual
policies and examples.
From West to East and
Back Again
An Educational Reading of Hermann Hesse’s Later Work
By
PeterRoberts
UniversityofCanterbury,Christchurch,NewZealand
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CONTENTS
Introduction:
Reading Hermann Hesse’s Later Novels from an Educational Point
of View 1

Chapter 1:
From West to East and Back Again 9

Chapter 2:
Mystery, Ritual and Education 25

Chapter 3:
More Than a Metaphor 41

Chapter 4:
Education, Society and the Individual 55

Chapter 5:
Life, Death and Transformation 65

Chapter 6:
Education, Incompleteness and Immortality 75

References 93

Acknowledgements 99

About the Author 101
v

INTRODUCTION
READING HERMANN HESSE’S LATER NOVELS
FROM AN EDUCATIONAL POINT OF VIEW
Over the last two decades, a number of philosophers of education have considered
the potential value of literature in addressing ethical, epistemological and
ontological questions (e.g., Barrow, 2004; Carr, 2005; Katz, 1997; Jollimore &
Barrios, 2006; Roberts, 2008a, 2008b; Sichel, 1992; Zigler, 1994). It has long been
recognised that novels and other literary works can play a distinctive role in moral
development (Cunningham, 2001; Nussbaum, 1990; Palmer, 1992; Weston, 2001)
and the education of the emotions (Gribble, 1983; Hepburn, 1972; Solomon, 1986).
The contribution of literature to the enhancement of reason, within both public and
private domains, has also been acknowledged (Novitz, 1987; Nussbaum, 1995;
Siegel, 1997).
For Nussbaum (1990), reading literary works is one of the ways we constitute
ourselves as moral and fully human beings. Interpreting a novel involves ‘a kind of
sympathetic reasoning that is highly characteristic of morality; for we ask
ourselves, as we try to enter into the plot, why the characters do what they do, and
we are put off if our inquiries lead to nothing but mystery and arbitrariness’
(Nussbaum, 1990, p. 346). Literature allows us to develop a form of ethical
understanding ‘that involves emotional as well as intellectual activity and gives a
certain type of priority to the perception of particular people and situations, rather
than to abstract rules’ (p. ix). As Jollimore and Barrios (2006) put it, ‘[t]he great
advantage of literature, as a tool for the cultivation of virtue, is precisely that it
allows for the complexities of moral reality to be depicted and investigated’
(p. 381). This point finds further elaboration in the work of Katz (1997), who
observes that in good novels, we find not abstract moral agents but three-
dimensional, complex characters in ‘dense, richly contextualized human situations,
situations that lend themselves to multiple interpretations’ (p. 8).
Given this philosophical and educational interest in literature, it is, I want to
suggest, timely to revisit the work of the German Nobel laureate, Hermann Hesse.
Hesse was born in Calw in 1877 and died in 1962. His family had strong
theological commitments, and it was expected that Hermann would follow in their
footsteps. Hesse was an exceptionally bright student, but he rebelled against
authority and did not have happy memories of his time in school. He rejected the
plans others had for him, having vowed from his thirteenth year to become ‘a poet
or nothing at all’ (Helt, 1996). He worked for periods as a mechanic and bookseller
before devoting himself completely to writing.
1
INTRODUCTION
A staunch opponent of the Nazi regime, Hesse spent much of his life in
Switzerland. There he composed many of the books for which he has become best
known: Siddhartha (Hesse, 2000a), Steppenwolf (Hesse, 1965), Narcissus and
Goldmund (Hesse, 1968a), and The Glass Bead Game (Hesse, 2000b). Hesse was
also a prolific reviewer, essayist and short story writer (Hesse, 1973a, 1973b,
1974a, 1974b, 1978, 1982, 1995). He commented critically and at length on the
world wars of the first half of the twentieth century (Hesse, 1974c) and was an
accomplished poet and artist (see Hesse, 1970, 1985).
A number of Hesse’s novels and stories address educational themes. Beneath the
Wheel (Hesse, 1968b), for example, focuses on the distressing school and
examination experiences of a young scholar; Demian (Hesse, 1999) explores the
relationship between Emil Sinclair and a fellow student, Max Demian; Siddhartha
(Hesse, 2000a) depicts a process of learning and spiritual growth through the
central character’s different modes of life; and The Glass Bead Game (Hesse,
2000b) is set in Castalia, a ‘pedagogical province’ of the future.
It is thus a matter for some surprise that so little attention has been paid to
Hesse’s work by educationists. There are rare exceptions (e.g., Nelson, 2008;
Papastephanou, 2008; Peters, 1996; Sears, 1992), but on the whole Hesse seems to
have been largely ignored. There was intense interest in his work in the United
States and other English speaking countries in the late 1960s and 1970s,
particularly among younger readers, alternative lifestylers and counter cultural
thinkers (Gropper, 1970, 1972; Schwarz, 1970; Timpe, 1969). In more recent
years, with the rise of the Internet, artificial intelligence systems, and other digital
technologies there has been a renewed appreciation of Hesse’s prophetic thinking
in The Glass Bead Game (Leary, 1986; Peters, 1996; Roberts, 2009; Roberts &
Peters, 2011; Wands, 1999).
Flavia Arzeni (2009) has published an engaging and insightful book on Hesse
and a fellow Nobel laureate, the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore, under the title
An Education in Happiness. Arzeni’s academic background is in modern German
literature. Her book provides a wide ranging discussion of aspects of Hesse’s
biography and selected published works. The Journey to the East and The Glass
Bead Game are mentioned briefly in her study but do not figure prominently in the
discussion. The present volume makes these later works the principal focus for
educational analysis.
Hesse’s relevance for educationists lies not just in his overt focus on schooling
and other forms of institutional education but in his broader investigation, through
his literary work, of processes of human growth and development. Hesse can be
seen as one of the key figures in the evolution of the German Bildungsroman.
Bildung as a form of individual self-realisation occupies a central place in the
German literary and philosophical tradition. Goethe, Schiller and Humboldt,
among others, were concerned to counter what they saw as a worrying trend
toward narrowness and specialisation. The genesis of the Bildungsroman lies in the
changing historical circumstances of late 18th century Germany and represents a
humanistic response to the growth of science and materialism.
2
INTRODUCTION
Swales (1978, p. 12) notes that the term Bildungsroman was first coined by Karl
Morgenstern in the early 1820s. For Morgenstern, the Bildungsroman both
portrayed the Bildung of the novel’s central character and enhanced the Bildung of
the reader (to a significantly greater extent than any other kind of novel). It was
Wilhelm Dilthey’s approach in the late 19th century, however, that has been most
influential. Dilthey depicted the Bildungsroman in this manner:
A regulated development within the life of the individual is observed, each of
its stages has its own intrinsic value and is at the same time the basis for a
higher stage. The dissonances and conflicts of life appear as the necessary
growth points through which the individual must pass on his way to maturity
and harmony. (cited in Swales, 1978, p. 3)
Swales points to some of the limits of this definition (and other analyses premised
on it), drawing attention to the danger that the Bildungsroman can come to be seen
as little more than a vehicle for conveying the author’s ideas about personal growth
– a ‘discursive essay in the aesthetic mode, whereby the plot, the events chronicled,
are relegated to the level of contingent illustrative material’ (p. 4). This denies the
complexity and significance of human experience. As Swales (1978) points out, the
major novels of the Bildungsroman tradition are not merely allegories of inner life:
Practical reality continues to impinge on the cherished inwardness of the
hero, and precisely this process is the source of the irony, the obliqueness, the
uncertainty which so many commentators have noticed. It is, moreover, the
same process that makes the “learning from life” which the hero undergoes
such a tentative progression. Over and over again, the novels themselves pose
the question of whether the hero has achieved any kind of worthwhile goal or
insight. The notion of organic growth, of a maturing process that somehow
eludes even conceptual terms, is a difficult one to pinpoint in terms of
unequivocal narrative realization. Perhaps we are essentially concerned with
an article of faith that seeks to assert the reconcilability of human wholeness
on the one hand and the facts of limited and limiting social experience on the
other. (Swales, 1978, p. 30)
Swales observes that while a certain scepticism about the law of linear experience
is characteristic of the Bildungsroman genre, the best authors in this tradition
nonetheless remain true to the novel form and do not confuse their art with the
writing of philosophical treatises. Part of the role of the Bildungsroman is to
remind us that we have all have a story to tell, and that while we can question and
wrestle with what life throws at us, we cannot halt the flow of experience. It is, as
Swales puts it, ‘the story which binds together contingencies into the weighty
sequence of a human destiny’ (1978, p. 33). The Bildungsroman allows the novel
to consider experience not as something fixed and final. The meaning of growth –
of formation and development – depicted in exemplary works in this tradition lies
not so much in the goals set by the central characters as in the process through
which such goals are pursued:
3
INTRODUCTION
The grasping for clarity and losing it, the alteration of certainty of purpose
with a sense of the overriding randomness of living, these are seen to be the
very stuff of human experience and such meaning and distinction as men are
able to attain. The Bildungsroman, then, is written for the sake of the journey,
and not for the sake of the happy ending toward which that journey points.
(Swales, 1978, p. 34)

Swales argues that the best Bildungsromanae occupy ‘the awkward middle ground
between wholeness and constriction, between possibility and actuality’. This
tension is an expression of the ‘moral and spiritual uncertainties at the heart of
bourgeois society, of an allegiance to practical reality and to that creative
transcendence vouchsafed by the individual’s inwardness’ (1978, p. 158).
Swales’ comments provide an ideal backdrop against which to consider Hesse’s
penultimate novel, The Journey to the East (Hesse, 1956). For in this short literary
work can be found, in germinal form, many of the features of the Bildungsroman
described by Swales: the idea of an inner or spiritual journey, the tension between
the possible and the actual, and the importance of context in character formation.
First published in 1932, The Journey to the East is Hermann Hesse’s most deeply
personal novel. This enigmatic work, with its deceptively simple narrative
structure, lends itself well to multiple interpretations and has much to offer
educationists. The Journey to the East provides the main focus for the two chapters
of this book.
In chapter 1 I suggest that Hesse, while very much a man of the West, was
nonetheless strongly attracted to the idea of ‘the East’. In The Journey to the East,
the main character, H.H., lives in despair following the apparent dissolution of a
League of Journeyers to the East. He seeks to overcome his despair, and learns the
League is alive and well, through the character of Leo. At the end of the book
H.H., having confessed his ‘sins’ and faced both his League brothers and himself,
believes he has found the answer to his troubles. I argue that this solution is
illusory. H.H. relies too heavily on faith and abandons reason too quickly in
seeking to become ‘absorbed’ into the Other he regards as his higher self. An
answer to H.H.’s existential angst can be found in Hesse’s final novel, The Glass
Bead Game (Hesse, 2000b), where educational growth through the development of
an inquiring, questioning attitude is a central theme.
Chapter 2 delves deeper into The Journey to the East, beginning with an
examination of the autobiographical and dream-like features of the novel. I follow
this with a detailed analysis of the ritual of confession undertaken by H.H.
Extending the analysis undertaken in chapter 1, I argue that H.H., in failing to
grasp the importance of education and critique for self-understanding, will be
unable to make the most of the knowledge available to him through the League
archives, and his reflections on himself, Leo and the purpose of his existence will
have only limited lucidity. He will, I suggest, have a considerable distance still to
travel on his journey to ‘the East’.
The remaining chapters address The Glass Bead Game. Those who have
examined this great novel from an educational perspective have tended to
4